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I don’t know. Sometimes I think my brain opened as far as it could go when I was about seventeen, and its doors have been just stuck there ever since. And now they’re ossifying and collecting cobwebs, and things are spilling in, swirling around for a bit, and then flying out again. And someday they’ll start to swing slowly shut, and I’ll be left in the dark with nothing but a few rustling fragments of thoughts that get thinner and weaker every time I use them. Like tea leaves.
The bedroom was pitch black and cold, the glow of the digital clock the only fuzzy source of light.
Those postmodern things that read like a dictionary mated with a Buddhist mantra and couldn’t possibly make any sense to anyone.”
Until three years ago, he’d been at Oxford, where referring to a building as old meant someone was studying in it a thousand years ago. I’d been there on a family visit once, and had felt the dust-stifled weight that comes from centuries of scholarship and ancient stone.
Uriah Heep was functioning as a scapegoat for middle-class anxieties in David Copperfield,
the means by which he’s constructed as a threat to the social order,
“It doesn’t matter what you mean! It’s what you do.
For the record, Uriah Heep is a very ugly character. He had a face like a skull—cadaverous, I think the Internet had said—and a skeletal body to match: tall, pale, thin, with red hair shaved far shorter than I’d thought the Victorians went in for, and reddish eyes without eyebrows or eyelashes. His jeans and sweatshirt had changed with him to a black tailcoat, funereal garb. His limbs twitched and writhed, apparently without his input; I thought, inexplicably, of the branches of the tree at the back of our childhood house. I was more interested in the knife in his hand. It was a modern box
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For all I know, I can write it for myself. I don’t have to do what the story says. I can do whatever I want.”
They always win. They all hate me and I hate them and they always win!”
I remember being silenced by surprise and awe at the sight of him: how real and solid he was and yet how small and fragile, the way his huge, dark eyes reached into mine and tugged at my heart.
I would do anything—I would kill the whole world—to keep him from being scared or hurt.
Uriah Heep and Orlick from Great Expectations are both shadow versions of the main characters—I think some of Orlick got mixed up with Uriah. It’s the sort of thing Orlick does to people.”
“This is reality, not story. Reality is built from facts.” “‘There is nothing more deceptive than an obvious fact,’”
Words on paper are quiet, and porous; in the right mood, I sink down between the gaps in the letters and they close over my head.
So I’ll be drifting in words, absorbing, and the words I absorb will be racing through my bloodstream. Every nerve, every neuron will be sparking and catching fire, and my heart will be quickening to carry it through faster, and my eyes will be tearing ahead to take in more and more. This isn’t magic yet, or whatever the word is. (It’s always annoyed me that I can’t find the word.) This is just reading a book. And while I’m reading, the new words I’m taking in will connect to others already taken in.
That phrase is from the poem earlier. Deeper. That’s a reference to the myth of Orpheus. That’s a pairing of two words that don’t usually go together. Wider. That’s a symbol Dickens employs often. That typifies Said’s writings on Orientalism. Points of light. They make a map, or a pattern, or a constellation. Formless, intricate, infinitely complex, and lovely. And then, at once, they’ll connect. They’ll meet, and explode. Of course. That’s the entire point. That’s how the story works, the way each sentence and metaphor and reference feeds into the other to illuminate something important. That
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It’s about interpreting, understanding, visualizing, connecting. Basically, still reading a book.
Too dark for half past six on a spring evening in October.
New zealand crazy
“I think of how it fits into the wider story, and I concentrate on that—but this isn’t my reading.
Hermeneutic circle
spectral dog
froze in horror,
Barf
Never in the delirious dream of a disordered brain could anything more savage, more appalling, more hellish be conceived than that dark form and savage face which broke upon us out of the wall of fog’?”
“That’s classical logic. It’s conditional implication—the ‘if–then’ structure is echoed. And it’s from Watson, which is notable—deductive reasoning is now worked into the fabric of the narration, and not just personified in Sherlock Holmes…”
Millie Radcliffe-Dix drank it in with pleasure, and with satisfaction.
Fun
this man was a work of art. His hair was a wave of softest gold. His skin was polished ivory. His cheekbones were sharp enough to pose a flight risk. His eyes defied all metaphor. People who looked into them without fair warning tended only to report, incoherently, that they were blue.
I wondered, not for the first time, why I always felt the need to punish my brother for being too willing to come when I called.
“It’s a liminal space,” he said. “What do you mean?” “A threshold. A gap between two places or states of being. Like the time between night and day, or a secret passage between the walls of a house.”
“Pasifika culture has a concept called the va,” I said, despite myself. It was something we’d learned about in law school. “The space between two people, or cultures. Sort of an imaginary landscape, made up of the social, personal, and spiritual bonds that comprise the relationship.”
because you’re embarrassingly English.
I could probably bring you through as well. If you hold on to me, and don’t let go. You would really have to not let go, though.” “Oh, don’t worry,” I said. “I won’t.”
I can’t explain myself, I’m afraid, sir, because I’m not myself, you see. God
misanthropic Byronic neuroses.
What’s so surprising about that?” “Well,” I said unwisely,
Fun
I have not the talent which some people possess of surrendering a situation to the management of others.”
Dorian said with exaggerated patience.
Something has to be heard to be ignored.
Implied Reader.
And accountants, it transpired, could at least sort things out, probably better than girl detectives.
Anna Karenina
beautifully written hysteria.)
“I know we must move with the times, but they seem to move so fast.”
Some had a terrible time before the Street came into being.”
We’ve read our own myths into the world.”
History is every bit as much of a story as fiction. There’s no reason a reader can’t construct their own Duke of Wellington just as clearly as they might construct their own personal Uriah Heep.
the Implied Reader,”
“Iser’s phenomenological theory of reader response?” Charley said, his face kindling again. “Truly? How strange.”
“It’s not complicated. It’s just the idea that every book has an implied reader—a sort of imaginary person the author has in mind while he’s writing. I supposed in the Implied Reader’s case, that wasn’t visualized terribly distinctly.” “Poor chap,” Millie agreed. “He’s really just middle-aged, white European, and middle class.”
“Estella tells Pip to put him out of her thoughts. And he says, ‘Out of my thoughts! You are part of my existence, part of myself. You have been in every line I have ever read since I first came here.’
It was fear, she decided, after a while. That was what it was. Jealousy, and hatred, and fear.
